It has been reported that, due to ineffective and/or inefficient collection, cities and municipalities across the country have lost large sums of money in terms of nonpayment of tickets for parking and traffic violations. Many unpaid tickets remain unpaid because the time and costs associated with tracking down and collecting on these unpaid tickets has been considered excessive, and for the most part, not practical.
Towing and impounding of vehicles, or the use of other immobilization devices, such as a boot, have proved quite effective in enforcing collection of unpaid tickets. However, an officer must be able to readily identify the vehicles having outstanding, unpaid tickets in order to determine when these devices should be used. Typically, such identification is done by license plate numbers. Although many police departments keep records of license plate numbers, either in a paper file or stored in a computer, related to prior unpaid tickets of vehicles registered for a particular geographical area, it is extremely difficult to disseminate such information on a regular basis to officers on duty. Such difficulty means that revenues from unpaid parking tickets and other violations simply remain unrecovered and possible offenders will continue to escape detection.
In addition to revenue collection from traffic and/or parking violations, it is also desirable to provide a police officer on duty the capability of conveniently and effectively determining whether or not an observed vehicle has been associated with other criminal activity, either in that particular district or state, or in another geographical region of the country. This determination is particularly important in view of recent efforts to detect and enforce vehicles associated with illegal drug smuggling activity.
From the perspective of an enforcement officer, it is critical that any system used to provide updated license plate information must not impair the officer's ability to perform his or her normal duties in an efficient and in a safe manner. For instance, an officer on duty does not have time to page through a computer print-out to determine whether or not an observed violator has any uncollected, expired tickets, or whether the observed vehicle is a stolen vehicle or associated with other criminal activity. Typically, it takes about 45 seconds for an officer to write a ticket. Any system that demands significantly more time would be considered inefficient. Moreover, a system that requires the attention of an officer for too great a duration of time puts him or her in physical danger unless another officer is present.